The Brotherhood of the Blastolene: Mechanized Anarchy and the Men Behind It

Out of separate shops on the West Coast comes a vision of automotive originality.

It shouldn’t exist, but here it is, in a small shop, behind a green, wooden roll-up door, in an old, nondescript, unmarked building on a side street in perpetually funky Santa Cruz, California. It’s a never-run, air-cooled, 520-hp 12.7-liter V-12 aircraft engine, the last of which was assembled in 1945. Called the Ranger V-770, it’s an angry-looking, supercharged ­monster with huge, aluminum-finned steel barrels sticking out of a two-piece aluminum crankcase. Wires snake from the distributors, sending juice to the 24 spark plugs. It’s an archaic escapee from World War II, when piston engines still ruled the air. Now it’s just sitting on a pallet growing more obsolete.

Meanwhile, its twin, another new old stock Ranger that once belonged to the late land speed record holder Art Arfons, is being twisted into art as part of Michael Leeds’s current project in the same shop/studio. “It was mounted inverted in airplanes,” explains Leeds as he points out its installation into the sculpture. “So the heads and barrels have been swapped from side to side and now, instead of the exhaust exiting in the valley, it gets out the sides. And that’s how it sits—upside down from its intended orientation—in the Blown Ranger.”

The Blown Ranger is a needle-nosed, two-seat roadster with a monocoque structure built from a single ribbon of steel. The thing is about as big as a mid-1960s Cadillac. It’s a piece of art that’s long been germinating in this space. And it’s the most ambitious current project of the Blastolene Brotherhood, a loose confederation of automotive artists who mutually support each other and work on a massive scale. While its name is derived from a barbecue sauce Leeds created for a restaurant he once owned, Blastolene is a serious artistic collective, with a common aesthetic sensibility running through its work. It’s something well beyond hot rodding.

Top right: The Blown Ranger's structure is a single sheet of steel that runs around the cockpit and forward to the front suspension.

Mostly, though, Blastolene is Leeds and his friend Randy Grubb, who work alone in separate studio shops. Leeds’s workspace is in Santa Cruz and Grubb’s is alongside his log house in the wooded hills on the outskirts of Grants Pass, Oregon. They are the founders and continuing artistic core of Blastolene.

Blastolene’s cars are art, but not art cars. Art cars are old Chevy vans with broken pieces of bowling trophies glued to their flanks. They’re prehistoric Cadillacs covered in house paint and pink fur or VW Beetles decorated in bunny ears and whiskers. Self-indulgent, uninteresting, and brutally insipid, art cars park in Venice, California, where their owners live in them.

What the Blastolene Brotherhood produces are vehicles engineered to evoke emotion, not cheap laughs. Machines built around the parts and pieces left behind by the 20th century. They’re not commissioned hot rods of the sort that might come out of Chip Foose’s shop or Rad Rides by Troy. They’re one-offs built to scratch each artist’s particular, uncompromised itch.

“What I’m trying to do as an artist is create enduring works of art,” says the ­gangly Grubb, who speaks in a crystal-clear stream of consciousness. “Not just build another car. I don’t want anybody telling me it needs to be done faster or cheaper. I’m going to take however much time it takes and that’s going to be my cost.”